Parallel Programming through Configurable Interconnectable Objects

This paper presents P-RIO a parallel programming environment that supports an object based software configuration methodology. It promotes a clear separation of the individual sequential computation components from the interconnection structure used for the interaction between these components. This makes the data and control interactions explicit, simplifying program visualization and understanding. P-RIO also includes a graphical tool that provides system visualization features, that help to configure, monitor and debug parallel programs.As high level features can potentially incur overhead, the Concert system employs a range of compiler and runtime optimization techniques to efficiently support the high level programming model. The compiler techniques include type inference, inlining and specialization; and the runtime techniques include caching, prefetching and hybrid stack/heap multithreading. The effectiveness of these techniques permits the construction of complex parallel applications that are flexible, enabling convenient application modification or tuning. We present performance results for a number of application programs which attain good speedups and absolute performance.